Sir Edward Grey was a country man. He regarded the Foreign Office, where he spent eleven years as Foreign Secretary, as a dungeon from which he escaped on weekends to the sunlit glades of the New Forest or to the waters of a Hampshire trout stream. At his desk, he worked with devotion but without joy; he preferred talking about the majesty of Handel or the beauty of Wordsworth to talking about the balance of power or the Triple Alliance. He left Britain only once during his term of office, and spoke only a few phrases of primitive French, but he was the greatest British Foreign Secretary of the century.
Grey was the junior conspirator of the Relugas Compact trio. He was born in 1862, ten years after Asquith, six years after Haldane. His roots were at Fallodon, the family estate in Northumberland near the Scottish border, within sight of the North Sea. His grandfather, Sir George Grey, was a country baronet who spent forty years in the House of Commons and served as Home Secretary in the Liberal Cabinets of Lord John Russell and Viscount Palmerston. Grey’s father was a retired colonel who fought in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny and then continued for fifteen years as one of the Prince of Wales’ rotating equerries. During one period of attendance on the Prince, Colonel Grey suddenly died of pneumonia at Sandringham. He left his wife with seven children; Edward, twelve, was the eldest. Sir George Grey promptly retired from Parliament and assumed a paternal role with his fatherless grandchildren.
At fourteen, Edward Grey went to Winchester. He was marked by his skill at Greek and Latin and by his desire to be alone. He was an exceptional tennis player and cricketer, but preferred to wander off to the river Itchen, which flowed past the school playing fields. There, the distant schoolboy shouts were erased by the babble of the water and Grey lost himself casting his fly between the reeds. From Winchester, Grey went to Balliol, where he led a life “of pure pleasure1... it led to nothing but left no scars, nothing to be regretted or effaced.” When he was twenty, his grandfather died, leaving him the baronetcy, the Fallodon estate of two thousand acres, and responsibility for his mother and younger brothers and sisters. He still did no work and in 1884 was sent down by Jowett. “Sir Edward Grey,”2 wrote the Master of Balliol, “having been repeatedly admonished for idleness, and having shown himself entirely ignorant of the work set him during the vacation, was sent down.” Grey returned to Fallodon, where, left to himself, he began to read the books he had ignored at Oxford. At the end of the term, he returned to Balliol, took his examinations, and won an undistinguished degree.fn1
Eighteen months after leaving the university, Grey married a Northumberland squire’s daughter, Dorothy Widdrington, whom he had met at a shooting party. She, like Grey, was a proud, interior person, uneasy in society. Her mind was subtle and worked rapidly; she judged questions on their merits “in the clear, cold light3 of reason.” She was as disdainful of cant as she was of trivia. “Her downright question ‘Why?’ often startled and almost terrified a careless talker.” Grey, whose stern exterior belied an inner gentleness, depended on Dorothy. A few weeks before their marriage, he wrote to her: “I believe, however busy,4 however active, however flustered a man may be with the battle of life, he is always looking for some place where he may lay his inner heart, his soft and tender nature, in safety; else there is danger that he may lose it altogether or find it injured in the rough struggle. Such a place he finds in a woman, and when he really loves, he confides it all to her freely without reserve.” They had no children and were content; each wrote to the other every day they were apart.
In November 1886, a month after his marriage, Grey, twenty-three, won a seat in the House of Commons, defeating a Percy from the clan which had been lords of Northumberland since the Middle Ages. Soon after Grey’s arrival in Parliament, Gladstone split the Liberal Party over Home Rule. During the next six years of opposition, Grey met Asquith and Haldane and formed lasting friendships and a lifelong political alliance.
In 1892, Gladstone returned to Downing Street for the fourth and last time. Grey was selected by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery, as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He had no previous experience, training, or special interest in foreign affairs, but, in the parliamentary system, expertise is supplied, not by the politicians who move in and out of senior government offices, but by the permanent civil servants who function at a level just below. Grey had no say in the making of policy; his assignment—Rosebery was in the House of Lords—was to explain and defend the government’s policy in the Commons. The House soon noticed that when Grey spoke it was with precision and authority. The most important of his statements was made on March 28, 1895. Rumors had reached London that France was preparing an expedition across Africa to the headwaters of the Nile. Great Britain claimed predominance over this region for Egypt and herself. “I cannot think it possible5 these rumors deserve credence,” Grey told the House, “because the advance of a French expedition under secret instructions right from the other side of Africa into a territory over which our claims have been known for so long, would not be merely an inconsistent and unexpected act, but it must be perfectly well-known to the French Government that it would be an unfriendly act, and would be so viewed by England.” Joseph Chamberlain immediately rose from the Opposition Bench to declare that what Grey had said was “the fullest and clearest statement6 of the policy of the Government with regard to this subject that we have yet had from a responsible Minister.” In fact, Grey’s statement—which came to be known in diplomatic history as the “Grey Declaration”—had not been approved by the Cabinet. The morning after, it was the subject of a lively debate at 10 Downing Street. Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister, eventually won endorsement of Grey’s position against the opposition of ministers who felt that Britain had no business on the Upper Nile, or, indeed, in Egypt.
In 1895, Lord Rosebery’s government fell over the question of the supply of cordite and the Liberal Party stepped aside for another ten years of Unionist rule. Grey was not unhappy to leave office. “There was no pleasure for me7 in the House of Commons work,” he wrote. “I could express clearly to others what I had previously made clear to my own mind, but beyond that there was no natural gift for speaking.” Grey remained in Parliament between 1895 and 1906, but, out of office, he was able to devote more time to private life.
The appeal of a peaceful life, primarily a life spent amidst nature, was at war with political ambition in both Edward and Dorothy Grey. In 1893, when Grey was Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Dorothy explored the subject for three hours with Haldane. At the end, Haldane went away saying, “I understand at last.8 You must not stay in politics. It is hurting your lives. It is bad.” Dorothy immediately wrote to Edward at the House of Commons: “I... said that if we went on9 crushing our natural sympathies we should probably end by destroying our married life, because the basis and atmosphere of its beauty would be taken away and it would die.... He [Haldane] said he had felt in himself how much your unhappiness in office made it difficult to talk to you or be intimate, and that he had been feeling there was no spring or heart in either of us.... We talked for a long time, he arguing in favor of giving up politics and I against it, and I believe he had the best of it. I was quite touched by him; we must be nice to our Haldane. He thinks now that it would be quite reasonable if you resigned at once, though I told him we had no idea of that.” Haldane stuck to his view only a few months. Before long, he was writing to Dorothy: “The one blow10 that I should feel a heavy and even a crushing one would be that Edward should leave politics. For me it would rob the outlook of much of its hope and meaning. I think his presence is of the... [greatest] importance to the Liberal Party. And how much I believe in that Liberal Party and in the work we have to do, you know.” The issue was to perplex Grey all his life: on the one hand, he believed that the best life possible lay in contemplation of God’s world of nature; on the other, his stern sense, stemming from a Whig ancestry, of duty to party and country, forbade him the naturalist’s life he craved.
They found a solution in compromise. From the moment they arrived in London, Edward and Dorothy Grey agreed that town life was “intensely distasteful.”11 Needing a refuge, and finding Northumberland and Fallodon too distant for weekends, Grey recalled the rippling, trout-filled waters of the river Itchin flowing past the playing fields of Winchester. He and Dorothy acquired half an acre of meadow sloping down to the stream and built a small weekend cottage of brick and wood. Buried in roses, it became a haven and sanctuary. Nothing was allowed to intrude; politics were banished and weekend invitations refused. “The cottage became dearer12 to us than Fallodon itself,” Grey wrote. “It was something special and sacred, outside the normal stream of life.” There were no servants; a village woman came across the fields on weekends to clean and cook. This style of life met Grey’s definition of luxury: “that of having everything13 that we did want and nothing that we did not want.”
In London during the spring and summer, Grey and his wife waited eagerly for Saturday mornings. On Saturdays, they rose by alarm clock, left their house on Grosvenor Road at five-thirty A.M., walked across Lambeth Bridge, and took a six o’clock train from Waterloo Station. By eight A.M. they were having breakfast in their cottage. On midsummer Saturdays, Grey fished from ten until two, and then again from seven until nine in the evening, when the river faded into dusk. He described these days as “an earthly paradise.”14
“The angler is by the river15 not later than ten o’clock: the stream is lively but quiet, and here and there the surface is broken by the recurring swirl of a swaying reed; but no life disturbs it.... Not a bird skims the surface of the water, not a fly is to be seen, not a sign of a living creature under it. But the fresh light air is like a caress, the warm sun shines interrupted only by the occasional passage of small, white clouds, the water meadows are bright with buttercups, and the woods and hedges that are on their borders are white with hawthorne blossoms or lit by the candelabra of horse-chestnut flower. Birds of many sorts, most notably blackbirds, are singing, and the angler in his hour of waiting has such entertainment as seems more than imperfect man can deserve or comprehend. Presently—it may be soon or not till after an hour or more—flies begin to appear on the surface of the water, the rise of a trout is seen; in a short time all is life and agitation. Trout are rising everywhere, some audibly, some without a sound; flies are hatching out all over the river, sitting or skipping in little flights on the water or rising into the air; a moving network of birds, swifts, swallows, and martins is on the river; a rush of bird life and the swish of the wings of the swifts is heard as they pass and repass up and down the stream; and the angler, no longer inert, is on his knees in the midst of it all, at convenient distance from a rising trout, one arm in constant action and the rod and line making a busy sound in the air as he dries and casts his fly. Now for two hours or more his life is energy, expectation, anxiety, resource and effort....”
Sundays, Grey read, took walks, bicycled, or simply sat with Dorothy watching the birds. He was a serious reader and quoted with approval the story of a man happy in his country home when unexpected visitors were announced. The man greeted his visitors, declared that he was delighted to see them, and then said, “And now what16 would you like to do? We are reading.” Both Greys were fascinated by birds: their diversity of plumage, their multifarious songs, their ability to fly. “If you will lie on your back17 on a fine day, you may see gulls sailing high in the air, without apparent effort or movement of wing, as though it was not necessary for them to descend at all,” he marvelled. Dorothy Grey shared in everything. Sometimes, she fished beside her husband; more often she brought a book and alternated between reading and watching him fish. She was the keener and more expert bird-watcher. When Edward could not come to the cottage, she went alone, spending the entire weekend in solitude.
In March, Grey went to Scotland to fish for salmon. “The greatest of all sport18 in fly-fishing is that for spring salmon in a big river,” he said. Beginning in October, he would lie awake in bed fishing in his imagination the deep pools where the salmon were resting on their passage up the river. A strong and undeniable pull from a salmon weighing fifteen, twenty, even thirty pounds was “one of the great moments19 of joy in life.” The most memorable of these Highland fishing expeditions came in the late summer of 1905, when Grey leased Relugas House, which looked down on the wild gorge of the Findhorn River. Here, Dorothy wrote to Haldane, “in his few intervals indoors,20 he sits by a window which overlooks a good pool and murmurs, ‘What a nice word river is!’”
It was the last blissful summer of Edward Grey’s life. Three months after leaving Scotland, he was Foreign Secretary, embarked on an eleven-year journey. On February 1, 1906, five months after leaving the Highlands, two months after her husband had taken office, Dorothy Grey was at Fallodon waiting for her husband. She went for a drive alone, the horse shied, and she was thrown out of the small cart onto her head. She never regained consciousness. Grey was attending a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence when the telegram came. He took the night train from King’s Cross and sat with her for forty hours before she died.
He was alone, but not deserted. His biographer writes: “The memories he amassed21 in those twenty years with Dorothy among the woods and the birds, or alone with his rod by the waters, were the capital on which he lived during the long years of his widowerhood, his grim struggle to guide the brute forces of Europe onto the paths of peace, and the blindness that mocked his final escape from office.” Even as Edward Grey lost his sight, those memories did not dim. In his mind, he could still see “the luxuriance of water meadows,22 animated by insect and bird and trout life, tender with the green and gay with the blossoms of early spring; the nobleness and volume of the great salmon rivers, the exhilaration of looking at any salmon pool, great or small; the rich brownness of Highland water.... [An angler who has known these things] will look back upon days radiant with happiness, peaks of enjoyment that are not less bright because they are lit in memory by the light of a setting sun.”
Grey had no particular liking for foreign countries. Unlike Lord Salisbury, Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain, or Sir Henry Camp-bell-Bannerman, all of whom relaxed by reading French novels, or Richard B. Haldane, whose recreation lay in German philosophy and literature, Grey preferred Wordsworth and George Eliot. Grey never visited Marienbad, Biarritz, or the Riveria; he spoke no German and only a schoolboy French. In London, he avoided the society of foreign diplomats as he avoided society in general. At one point, exhausted by a prolonged period of crisis, he retreated to Fallodon. “I am alone here23 for a few days,” he wrote to a friend. “I like to be alone at first after a strenuous time.... My squirrels come on to my writing table and take nuts from my hand as if I had never been away. There is something restful in the unconsciousness of animals—unconscious, that is, of all the things that matter so much to us and do not matter at all to them.”
For ten years, this reclusive man guided the foreign policy of England. From Campbell-Bannerman, Grey was detached, politically and personally. He had opposed the Liberal leader during the Boer War and he had joined in the awkward and unsuccessful effort to force C.B. from the Commons to the Lords. In the twenty-seven months of Campbell-Bannerman’s Premiership, the two rarely saw each other outside of Cabinet meetings. Nevertheless, C.B. and Grey were in accord on the general lines of British foreign policy: maintaining the Entente with France, endeavoring to reach a similar agreement with Russia, and restraining German ambitions through British naval supremacy while seeking a mutual lowering of levels of naval armaments. As Prime Minister, Campbell-Bannerman left these matters mostly in Grey’s hands. When Asquith succeeded C.B. in 1908, Premier and Foreign Secretary were personal friends and trusted political allies. More even than C.B., Asquith left foreign policy to Grey. In the Cabinet and the Commons, Grey was the government spokesman; Asquith intervened only to confirm and reinforce. Grey rarely consulted the Cabinet and even more rarely spoke in the House; he spared the Prime Minister most details.
Grey based policy exclusively on what he perceived to be the interests of England. In 1895, when he was Parliamentary Under Secretary and the threat to those interests had come from France, Grey had firmly warned that Captain Marchand’s expedition to the Nile headwaters would be viewed in England as an “unfriendly act.”24 Nine years later, Grey—out of office—read the agreement Lord Lansdowne had negotiated with France with “a feeling of simple pleasure25 and relief... the menace of war with France had disappeared.” Grey’s attitude towards Germany was guided solely by how German policies affected England. He had learned early that dealing with the Wilhelmstrasse could be difficult. Soon after he became Under Secretary, British and German firms were competing for railway concessions in Anatolian Turkey. “Suddenly,” said Grey, “there came26 a sort of ultimatum from Berlin requiring us to cease competition... and stating that unless we did so, the German consul in Cairo would withdraw support from the British Administration in Egypt.... [This was followed by] a despairing telegram from Lord Cromer [British agent in Egypt] pointing out that it would be impossible to carry out his work in Egypt without German support in the face of French and Russian opposition.” In diplomacy, Grey admitted, one expects quid pro quos. But “it was the abrupt and rough peremptoriness27 of the German action that gave me an unpleasant surprise.... The method adopted by Germany in this instance was not one of a friend. There was no choice for us but to give way... but it left a sense of discomfort and bad taste behind.” Thereafter, Grey regarded Britain’s involvement on the Nile “like a noose28 round our neck... In this case, the noose had been roughly jerked by Germany.”
Grey had been surprised and distressed by Holstein’s and Bülow’s bludgeoning attempt to shatter the new Anglo-French Entente when the Kaiser landed at Tangiers. During the months that followed in the summer and autumn of 1905, he sympathized with Lansdowne and the Unionist Cabinet. “The French were being humiliated29 because of an agreement we had made with them,” he wrote later. “The agreement bound us only to diplomatic support, but... if Germany used force and France was in serious trouble, what was our position to be?” Before the question was answered, the Balfour government resigned, the Liberals came in, and members of the new Cabinet, including the Prime Minister, Campbell-Bannerman, left London to campaign for the January general election. The only member of the government who continued to work three days a week in London was the new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
Grey was quickly made aware that France was seeking a British military commitment in the event of war with Germany. Major Victor Huguet, the French Military Attaché in London, had seen Major General J. M. Grierson, Director of Military Operations in the War Office, and had talked for five hours with Colonel Charles Repington, the influential military correspondent of The Times. On December 29, Repington wrote to Grey that Huguet did not question the British government’s sympathy for France, but that he had asked “what the British Government30 were prepared to do.” On January 9, Grey wrote to Campbell-Bannerman in Scotland: “Indications keep trickling in31 that Germany is preparing for war in the spring. France is very apprehensive. I do not think there will be war.... But the War Office ought, it seems to me, to be ready to answer the question of what they could do, if we had to take part against Germany.” The following day, Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador, came to see Grey.fn2 “He put the question32 to me directly and formally,” the Foreign Secretary wrote to the Prime Minister, “...whether in the event of an attack34 by Germany arising out of Morocco, France could rely upon the armed support of England. I said that I could not answer this question. I could not even consult the Prime Minister or the Cabinet during the Election.... M. Cambon said he would again ask after the Election was over.”
Haldane urged that Huguet and Cambon deserved a quicker response. Accordingly, on January 16, without the approval of either the Prime Minister or the Cabinet, secret talks between British and French staff officers began. They focussed on plans to send 100,000 British soldiers to the Continent within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities. On January 26, when Campbell-Bannerman returned to London and was informed, he approved. On the thirty-first, Grey responded officially to Cambon: the military conversations would continue with the proviso that they not bind England in advance to war. “In the event of an attack upon France by Germany arising out of our Morocco agreement,” Grey said, he did not doubt that “public feeling in England would be so strong that no British government could remain neutral.” But Parliament would not be committed before the event and it would be impossible for any Cabinet to sign a defensive alliance with any foreign power without the knowledge and consent of Parliament.
On the same day, January 31, 1906, before seeing Cambon in the afternoon, Grey had attended a morning meeting of the new Cabinet, where he had informed the ministers that he had promised France unreserved diplomatic support in the Morocco crisis. Neither he, Campbell-Bannerman, nor Haldane had mentioned the military conversations. On the following day, February 1, Dorothy Grey was thrown from a cart in Northumberland. After her death on the fourth, Grey, in shock, offered to resign or take a lesser role. C.B., Asquith, Haldane, and the Cabinet begged him to persevere. Gradually, he regained his grip. The Algeriras Conference, begun in January, went forward through February and March, and ended in April, when Germany gave way. The threat of war receded and ministers in London turned to other problems. But the military staff conversations continued. And for six years, the Cabinet was not told.
Before and after the war, Grey was criticized for keeping most ministers of the British government in ignorance of detailed military talks with a foreign power. Grey’s tactic was to play down the importance of the conversations: Grierson and Huguet had been required to state in writing that their talks, although officially sanctioned, did not commit either of the governments to go to war; on this ground, Grey steadfastly insisted that neither Cabinet nor Parliament ever lost its freedom of action. Harold Nicolson’s explanation of Grey’s view was that “[Grey] did not attribute35 any but a purely technical and conditional importance to such conversations as soldiers or sailors might hold. These conversations, to his mind, were mere matters of routine which could be reversed with the stroke of a pen. They possessed to his mind, no more importance than discussions between the London Fire Brigade and the Westminster Water Works.”
The final responsibility for not informing the Cabinet rested with Campbell-Bannerman. It was his Cabinet, not Grey’s, and whatever the Foreign Secretary recommended, the Prime Minister had the power to overrule. The ingredients of a discussion between the two men can be imagined: within months, a successful colonial settlement with France had evolved into a threat of war with Germany. A new government, faced with an imminent General Election, risked distraction and a potential split if there was debate over entering a Continental military alliance. The new Cabinet, unaccustomed to working together, still lacked cohesion, and revelations in Cabinet might easily find their way to Parliament and the press. Better, then, to continue the conversations in secret, reminding all concerned—the officers involved, the French Ambassador, and his government in Paris—that nothing was guaranteed, that ultimately the House of Commons must decide.
The extent to which the military conversations committed Britain to France remained unclear to Asquith when he succeeded C.B. in 1908. Grey wrote to Asquith in 1911:
“Early in 190636 the French said to us, ‘Will you help us if there is war with Germany?’
“We said, ‘We can’t promise, our hands must be free.’
“The French then urged that the military authorities should be allowed to exchange views, ours to say what they could do, the French to say how they would like it done, if we did side with France. Otherwise, as the French urged, even if we decided to support France, on the outbreak of war we should not be able to do it effectively. We agreed to this. Up to this point, C.B.,... [Haldane] and I were cognizant of what took place—the rest of you were scattered in the Election.
“The military experts then conversed. What they settled, I never knew—the position being that the Government was quite free, but that the military people knew what to do if the word was given.”
Asquith, still nervous a few months later, wrote to Grey: “Conversations such as that37 between Gen. Joffre and Colonel Fairholme seem to me rather dangerous; especially the part which refers to British assistance. The French ought not to be encouraged, in present circumstances, to make their plans on any assumptions of this kind.” Grey’s reply was testy; he was performing a delicate balancing act between his obligations to Parliament and his personal commitment to France.
“My dear Asquith,”38 Grey wrote. “It would create consternation if we forbade our military experts to converse with the French. No doubt these conversations and our speeches have given an expectation of support. I do not see how that can be helped.”
During his first weeks in office, Grey set his course for the next eight and a half years. The restrictions imposed by parliamentary government sometimes made him appear evasive, even devious. He always insisted that, until the ultimate moment of decision, Parliament’s freedom of action had been preserved. On the other hand, it was equally clear to Grey personally—and he made his belief known to everyone else—that Britain’s national interest dictated support of France if war came between France and Germany. While Grey acknowledged this contradiction, he overcame it by saying that, although England was not legally bound to France, his own conviction decreed that he could not remain in a government which refused to stand by its Entente partner. Grey knew that Asquith would resign if he did; this meant that the Liberal government would fall. A Unionist government, returning Balfour and Lansdowne to office, would stand by France.
Underlying Grey’s policy was the imperative of British naval supremacy. He was a Liberal and advocated government spending for social reform, but once the German challenge was raised, he accepted that no matter how many ships Germany built, Britain must build more. As long as the only adversary was Germany, it could be done. There was, however, a grimmer possibility: if Germany achieved hegemony on the Continent, England would find herself at bay against the combined sea power of a united Europe. “What really determines39 the foreign policy of this country is the question of sea power,” Grey told an audience of Dominion delegates in 1911. “There is no... appreciable danger of our being involved in any considerable trouble in Europe unless there is some power or group of powers... which has the ambition of achieving what I call the Napoleonic policy.fn3 That would be a policy on the part of the strongest power in Europe... of... separating the other powers... from each other, taking them in detail, crushing them if need be, and forcing each into the orbit of the policy of the strongest power. The result would be one great combination in Europe, outside which we would be left without a friend. If that was the result, then... if we meant to keep command of the sea, we should have to estimate a probable combination against us of fleets in Europe, not of two powers, but five powers.”
For a century, British naval supremacy had made allies superfluous. Now, in Grey’s view, allies had become essential to the maintenance of British naval supremacy.
fn1 Forty-four years later, in 1928, Sir Edward Grey was elected chancellor of Oxford University.
fn2 Although Paul Cambon served as French ambassador in London for twenty-three years, he never learned to speak English. Cambon experienced no embarrassment with Lord Salisbury or Lord Lansdowne, the two previous foreign secretaries with whom he had dealt; both were fluent in French, the international language of diplomacy. Grey, however, spoke French poorly and, taking office at a moment of crisis, worried that communication with Cambon would be difficult. He explained in his memoirs how the difficulty was overcome:
“I could read French easily,33 but had no practice, and therefore no power of expressing myself in it,” Grey said. “Cambon’s position respecting English was exactly the same. He understood, but could not speak it. He spoke his own language so distinctly and with such clear pronunciation that every word could be visualized when listening to him. To listen to him was like reading French. Each of us, therefore, spoke his own language, and each understood perfectly. To make sure that we did understand we each exchanged the record that we had made separately... of one of these early conversations. The comparison of our records left no doubt that each of us had followed every word spoken. From that time we trusted each other completely.... All the other ambassadors of the Great Powers spoke English and spoke it well; so that the drawback of my deficiency in French was less than I had feared it would be.”
fn3 “Grey’s apprehension about Germany and her ambitions regarding Continental and world hegemony received continual, powerful stimulus from the senior Foreign Office clerk supervising the Western (European) Department. Eyre Crowe, the son of an English father and a German mother, lived in Germany until he was seventeen. His wife and many of his friends, including Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, Commander of the High Seas Fleet from 1909 to 1913, were German. Crowe’s intimate knowledge of Germany led him to deep suspicions of German militarism. On January 1, 1907 he submitted a lengthy memorandum on Anglo-German relations which was to exercise a strong influence on Foreign Office thinking in the years before the war. Germany, he argued, had achieved massive national power through a policy of “blood and iron.” It was natural that she now would wish to find her “place in the sun” as a world power. Finding Great Britain and the British Navy across her path, it was also natural that German policy toward England would be dominated by hostility. Britain should react to this challenge, Crowe advised, with “the most unbending determination40 to uphold British rights and interest in every part of the globe. There will be no surer or quicker way to win the respect of the German government and of the German nation.” Grey, impressed, forwarded Crowe’s analysis to Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Haldane, and Morley.